Category Archives: teaching

Public knowledge: “Black Womanhood” syllabus & women’s studies on wikipedia

collaboration & leadership, teaching

Black Womanhood syllabusCongratulations to professors Jessica Marie Johnson & Martha S. Jones, whose public syllabus for their course “Black Womanhood” is featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education! The syllabus is on Professor Johnson’s blog,  Diaspora Hypertext.

Here’s an excerpt from the Chronicle article:

“Within days of the syllabus being posted, some commenters suggested readings to add. . . . Since then, the syllabus has spread beyond academe. . . . Some people outside of higher education have expressed surprise that such a course exists at all. Some said they wish the subject had been taught in grade school. Successfully reaching a broader audience, Jones said, is ‘powerful stuff.'”

Please note also that the Faculty Forum is back, and Professor Jones is one of the presenters on Monday, April 9. Hope you can come!

Also, “Women’s-Studies Students Across the Nation Are Editing Wikipedia” features an interview with Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, about a partnership between NWSA and the Wiki Education Foundation. Kimmich says:

“Wikipedia is the fifth-most-visited website in the world. It’s a major source of information globally. . . . There is pretty obviously a gender bias in terms of featured articles on Wikipedia: The most numerous featured articles are articles on war and militarism. And that’s a particular view of the world that I think women’s- and gender-studies students can contribute to correcting and balancing. The other thing I’ve heard when I hear faculty talk about having participated in this initiative is that students are incredibly motivated by doing this work because they can see it has a real impact.”

Image credit: http://dh.jmjafrx.com/teaching/black-womanhood/

 

more on teaching & tenure

teaching

Leah Wasburn-Moses, after a long faculty meeting, went home and posted this on social media: apple-3256487_1920

“Friends on the Tenure Track: I feel as though our futures hinge on: (1) the amount of research we produce that nobody will ever read, (2) the extent to which our students like us, and (3) the number of committees we chair that will never do anything.”

In the Chronicle today, Wasburn-Moses discusses the race/gender biases of teaching evaluations as well as their meaninglessness, citing the 2017 study “Meta-analysis of faculty’s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related.” 

Read the full article, with Wasburn-Moses’ recommendations: “We Make Tenure Decisions Unfairly. Here’s a Better Way.”

 

Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman has a lot to say about teaching effectiveness, as you likely know. Here’s an excerpt from a 2016 article on his work:

“For Wieman, the fact that most colleges and universities don’t even bother to systemically measure teaching quality is the bigger problem festering in higher education. Administrators, he argues, are instead obsessed with publishing and research funding, which remain the bedrock of tenure and promotion.

“‘The quality of teaching is not something that university administrators are rewarded for, and correspondingly know or care about,’ Wieman says. ‘If they improved the quality of teaching by 100 percent and in the process reduced the amount of research funding and publications by 1 percent, they would be penalized, since the latter is carefully measured and compared across institutions, while the former is never measured.'”

Fostering an Inclusive Classroom

teaching

Karen Fleming & I were paired for a Lunch & Learn: Faculty Conversations about Teaching session last month for the Center for Educational Resources. Karen’s talk focused on research on unconscious bias (drawing on research published in PNASMale-Female-Stereotypes in 2012 as well as earlier work). Particularly compelling  is research showing that identical candidates for a (hypothetical) lab manager position fared quite differently, in the eyes of professors of all genders and backgrounds, depending on the apparent gender of the candidate.

My presentation focused on classroom approaches that can help students of many different backgrounds (visibly and less so) find their footing–in the course, and in the academy more broadly. Macie Hall, editor of the Innovative Instructor blog, wrote a nice summary of our talks.

I also wrote a followup post, called Texts of Engagement, in which I offer some resources that seem to me versatile enough to use in different kinds of classrooms, and toward different ends.

I divided these sources into four categories (listed below); the sources in the first three sections, in particular, can nearly all live quite comfortably in most disciplines.

  1. What is college for?
  2. Why bother with stories
  3. How textual analysis works
  4. Ideas for writing assignments

I hope you’ll take a look.

—Anne-Elizabeth Brodsky

Student evaluations & potential employment discrimination

equitable policies & practices, teaching

The other the day the Chronicle posted resclassroom-1699745_1920earch by Kristina M. Mitchell and Jonathan Martin, “Gender Bias in Student Evaluations,” published in PS: Political Science & Politics last week. Here is the abstract:

“Many universities use student evaluations of teachers (SETs) as part of consideration for tenure, compensation, and other employment decisions. However, in doing so, they may be engaging in discriminatory practices against female academics. This study further explores the relationship between gender and SETs described by MacNell, Driscoll, and Hunt (2015) by using both content analysis in student-evaluation comments and quantitative analysis of students’ ordinal scoring of their instructors. The authors show that the language students use in evaluations regarding male professors is significantly different than language used in evaluating female professors. They also show that a male instructor administering an identical online course as a female instructor receives higher ordinal scores in teaching evaluations, even when questions are not instructor-specific. Findings suggest that the relationship between gender and teaching evaluations may indicate that the use of evaluations in employment decisions is discriminatory against women.”

Mitchell published another version of this research in Slate: “Student Evaluations Can’t Be Used to Assess Professors” (March 19, 2018)

P.S.: In 2015, Ben Schmidt created a webpage called Gendered Language in Teaching Evaluations where you can search for terms (“brilliant,” “friendly”) used in ratemyprofessor.com reviews and see how they correlate with gender and discipline.

Also, many thanks to CSW member Yi-Ping Ong for sharing “Is Gender Bias an Intended Feature of Teaching Evaluations?” from February in Insider Higher Ed.

Gender, brilliance, & the economics department

Institutional Climate, teaching, Unconscious Bias

Last month at the 3rd Biennial Science of Learning Symposium hosted by the Science of Learning Institute, NYU psychologist Andrei Cimpian presented his collaborative work on perceptions of brilliance and gender.

Screen Shot 2018-02-19 at 7.15.38 PM

He and his colleagues found that success in fields such as physics, math, philosophy, economics, music theory & composition, and engineering is perceived to depend largely on the innate qualities of “brilliance” or “genius”–qualities that are typically gendered male. You can read the forthcoming full article in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology here. A shorter and chattier account with zippy graphics, co-authored with Princeton philosopher Sarah-Jane Leslie and published in  Scientific American, is here.

Where does this all come from? Well, that’s a big question . . . but, as Professor Cimpian pointed out his in talk, this 2016 ad for Gap Kids doesn’t help.

Sexist-Gap-Kids-Ad-Einstein-Name-Spelled-Wrong

(PS It’s hard to see, but they misspelled Einstein on the kid’s shirt. Really?)

But back to perceptions of brilliance in the academy, especially in field of economics. Last December The Economist ran an article titled “Women and Economics: The profession’s problem with women could be a problem with economics itself” that opens with these sobering statistics: “According to information from university websites, about 20% of Europe’s senior economists are women. In America, 15% of full professors are women. At Harvard, arguably the most prestigious economics department in the world, the faculty pictures that beam down from the wall feature 43 senior members of the department. Only three are women. Two have tenure.”

Cheers.

 

Gap image: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/media/2017/07/why-new-rules-gender-stereotyping-ads-benefit-men-too